Radboud University Nijmegen

Componence built a student portal based on Liferay Portal 6.1 Enterprise Edition for the Radboud University Nijmegen.

Radboud University

Radboud University Nijmegen is an internationally oriented, broad-based university, delivering excellent quality of education and research, and stimulating knowledge exchange between academics globally by forging cooperative links across disciplines.

Radboud University Nijmegen consists of 7 faculties offering 40 Bachelor's and 64 Master's degree programmes, as well as seventeen teaching courses. The university has excellent facilities, such as state of the art research laboratories and a knowledge and technology transfer office. Radboud University Nijmegen is closely affiliated with the Nijmegen Medical Centre St Radboud, one of the leading hospitals in The Netherlands, jointly offering educational services to 18.500 students and employing around 10.000 staff.

Challenge

Research

Solution

Challenge

The Radboud University Nijmegen student-portal is running on outdated, unsupported portal software which is unsuitable for expanding into a mobile portal version, or for outsourcing its maintenance. With the existing interface providing limited user-control, the portal needs to be migrated to a more modern infrastructure in order to meet today's demands.

Furthermore, the university's intranet -Radboudnet- is not capable of securely managing personalised information and services to its employees. Radboud University Nijmegen is looking to develop a brand new employee-portal, offering fast and secure access to its services and applications, as well as providing advanced control over sensitive data such as personal information and HR details.

Migration of the student-portal and the build of an employee-portal will be combined within a single new portal infrastructure, resulting in a shorter project timeframe and lower investment costs. In addition, Radboud University Nijmegen is hoping to make considerable savings on structural costs.

Solution

Following a rigid selection process, Radboud University Nijmegen chooses Liferay Portal over Hippo Portal and Oracle WebCenter, based on its open standards, its wide range of outsourced maintenance options, and its intuitive and user friendly maintenance interface. The availability of extensive standard functionalities for facilitating knowledge exchange and cooperation between academics are a decisive factor, as well as successful Liferay Portal implementations at Avans Hogeschool and the Open University. The Liferay team at Componence develops a portal infrastructure based on Liferay Portal 6.1 Enterprise Edition and migrates the student-portal to this new environment. Existing functionalities will be supported out of the box, while migration portlets will be taken care of by the university's development team. Componence will assist this team with the development of additional portlets and a brand new OTAP. Clustering of all these critical components will result in a high availability of this portal. The new student-portal offers its users an optimised interface and a wide range of knowledge transfer and cooperation facilities. The quality of the information flow has been strongly improved, and the information and services distribution is much more efficient compared to the old situation. The next phase will consist of implementing the employee-portal, creating access to Radboudnet from within the new portal infrastructure, including news, announcements, media, a services guide and HR terms and conditions. Lastly, Radboud University Nijmegen wants to open up the portal to mobile devices, and is planning to build a complex workflow between the portal and the Human resource information system BASS-HRM.